The most interesting, important thing in the entire universe

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy

An appendix Thomas Kuhn added to later editions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had a continuing influence on my understanding of design. In this appendix Kuhn explained that scientific paradigms should not be viewed exclusively in terms of thought. A paradigm is not just theoretical, or theoretically guided practice or practice informed theory (praxis of science, considered apart from the scientific knowledge the praxis generates), but also in terms of the physical instruments used in experimentation and observation. He used a vivid example of how a paradigm of electricity as a fluid shaped jar-like electrical containers, which the later electrical charge paradigm rendered naive.

So a paradigm shapes concept, concept system, language, behaviors and tools all together as a mutually-reinforcing system.

Years later, Lucy Suchman, one of the founders of modern design research brought ethnomethodology to the nonhuman actors in the office environment.

Ethnomethology is a branch of microsociology that locates social meaning-making as a function of mostly tacit symbolic performances, which are called ethnomethods, thus the name ethnomethod-ology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. (Many designers casually believe that design research is a less formal and thorough version of ethnography, which is not entirely wrong, but slightly confused. Our roots are more ethnomethodological than ethnographic, and that root was sunk by Suchman.)

Suchman’s mind-blowing practical insight was to treat a copy machine as a social actor, and to see her own design task as equipping that copier with ethnomethods required to participate gracefully in its social setting. This shows a strong family resemblance to Kuhn’s materialized paradigm.

It could even be said that Kuhn described unusually explicit and disciplined ethnomethods of science. Within the overarching principles and practices we call scientific method are multiple scientific ethnomethods, which are paradigms. Or it could be said that ethnomethods are looser, less explicit, more implicit paradigms.

Both paradigms and ethnomethods tend to focus themselves within specific spheres of social activity, as does the close study of either, or in the case of Actor-Network Theory, which began its expansive life ethnomethodologically studying human and nonhuman actors who populate and constitute laboratories.

But these approaches themselves all outgrew their humble origins, and became something resembling their own objects of study. The study of paradigms induces a meta-paradigm that seeks paradigms in any community of activity, even ones that are not communities of rigorous scientific activity. Ethnomethodology could easily study the ethnomethods of ethnomethodologists, and without even looking into it, given the kind of metaweirdo attracted to this field, I am unable to doubt that this happened within minutes of the establishment of ethnomethodology. There is no way at all this did not happen unless every ethnomethodologist automatically assumed what I am automatically assuming and decided not to bother. And anyway, why do something so obvious that it automatically occurs to everyone?

All this innovation happened at a time when flatness was fashionable. It was a daring and disarming move to say that Kuhn’s paradigm of paradigms was just another paradigm among paradigms, and not something belonging to another plane of metastudy. The ironic move of studying the ethnomethods of ethnomethodologists would be, ironically, an ethnomethod symbolically acting the unexceptionality of what ethnomethodology does.

But are these acts of principled, humble reflexivity truly innocent? What if there is a shade of benevolent bad-faith in it, an artificial doubt, a violation of Peirce’s principle: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

We choose to investigate paradigms or ethnomethodologies or to live a life of design because these things seem to us more expansive, profound and universal in important ways than even what they investigate. If they do not start out that way, they mature in that direction, and precisely because they are so expansive, profound and universal — because they overgrow their initial content of study, and then their own praxis, and culture and human condition, and, potentially, the metaconditions of the human condition (aka metaphysics), I call these all-encompassing meta-ways enworldments.

I might be wrong in my conceit that enworldments operate on a higher metaphysical plane than their objects of study (the knowledge they generate), than their subjects of study, (in the academic sense of subject, the shared praxis, the body of reciprocally-developed practice-informed theories and theory-guided practices of the discipline), than even their materialized praxes (tools, supplies, environment and other material supports).

I might even be stupidly wrong to believe in metaphysical planes at all in order to see such assignments.

But I am a person, and I am allowed to be stupid. That is my right as a relatively unimportant being! Why shouldn’t I confidently assert metaphysical truths that are absolutely true, as far as I can tell? If others see problems I miss, let them make their own counter-assertions. Let them catch me by total surprise if they can. I can’t squander my personal resources, anticipating every possible attack, or compulsively re-acknowledging that such attacks might be effective. Of course they are, and so what?

I prefer to be faithful to my true human beliefs than to be cagey in an attempt to avoid being caught and ridiculed for insuffient caution, humility and self-skepticism, or to make myself a less enticing target. I cannot help wondering what inclines people to spend their lives lurking about, looking for mistakes to catch and ridicule.

Ironically, false humility can be hubristic, and disingenuous hubris can be humble.

I think I am onto something of enormous importance and interest, I cannot doubt it, and I refuse to pretend to doubt it. If there is anything more fascinating and important in the world than the phenomenon of enworldment and its related phenomena (especially instauration ex nihilo) and the role design plays in it, it is entirely beyond me. So I intend to stand here within my own abilities and limitations and work this out in intense, innocent inspiration.

And when I look out into the world, what seems most lacking is inspiration, meaning, excitement and hope.

It seems to me that what blocks all these good, needful things is a fear of being caught making mistakes or showing our personal limits. Our negative goal of eliminating imperfections leads us to neglect the positive goal of doing things that are deeply and powerfully right.

The nihilism pandemic we are in might be the result of a misguided attempt to be tiny flawless gods according to narrow and mostly unexamined standards of what is better and worse, instead of living as imperfect, incomplete, interdependent vital organs of something greater than any or all of us, toward whom metaphysics reaches with all our being — mind, soul, body and all our myriad designed extensions of being.

We must get right with being wrong.

Domain-subdomain throwndown

Design, Metaphysics, Philosophy

To an objectivist (an adherent to an epistemology confined to objective comprehension), all truth is objective knowledge of objective reality.

Objective knowledge — as opposed to what? Subjective experiences.

If a subjective experience motivates behavior, it triggers an event in objective reality, and now can be known objectively as truth. Until then, subjectivity is objectively real only as neural processes productive of mental epiphenomena.

Objectivism sees objects of sight, while excludes its own seeing as real.

Objectivism is often materialist, but not essentially.

Objectivism concerns form; materialism concerns substance.

Matter is unformed but formable; understood formationally matter it is material.

A metaphysics of matter differs from a material metaphysics.

Someday, when materialists figure out how to explain the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious matter, without committing the performative contradiction of assuming and relying upon both their own consciousness and the consciousness of those to whom they explain away consciousness, I’ll take them seriously as philosophers.

Until then, I’ll regard them as scientistic technicians unconsciously overstepping the bounds their mastery into metaphysical questions they do not yet even know how to ask, much less answer.

The methodological reductionism so virtuous and necessary to science is, when applied to metaphysics is not only unhelpful but vicious. To confuse the ontology and practice of science with the ontology and practice of metaphysics is to conflate objective braininess with wisdom (the intuition of reality beyond the cognitive grasp of objectivity).

We can, and maybe should, place panpsychism outside of the domain of science, but we should never allow the domain of science to limit or even dominate or even try to found/underpin/regulate the super-domain of understanding to which science belongs as part.

The same error that places knowledge under the rule of science, and locates subjectivity within objective reality also sees design as a subset of engineering. Design is the superset, and all engineering work should be defined, guided and supervised by design.

“Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Existentialism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, can be simplistically stated in a diamond-terse Basque saying and its negative corollary:

“What has a name is real.”

“What lacks a name is unreal.”

What is meant here by “real” and “unreal” is relative to us in our first person plural.

What has a name is (taken by us as) real; what lacks a name is (taken by us as) unreal.

In order for something to be unreal to us, however, it must already be given to us in some way, in order to be denied as unreal. Otherwise, it is ungiven, and, to us nothing, and, as nothing, can be taken neither as real or unreal.

In every age, most of all now, some of our most important givens are rejected as unreal to our deepest detriment. And some of our key given truths are ideas and only ideas, mistaken for intuitable realities, also to our detriment.

The designerly task of the philosopher is to identify these rejected, nameless unrealities, and name them, so they can become real to us.

To quote Eric Voegelin, “Why Philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Etymology will provide us some basic ideas required for the work of restoring reality to crucial ideas that are unreal to us. They will root and anchor our work.

Etymologically, the word “datum” means given; “data” is multiple givens.

Etymologically, taking is what we do when we receive something as given to perception or conception. The root “-ceive” refers to the act of taking, and “-cept” refers to that which is taken.

This etymologic frames a set of give-and-take questions:

Given how? Given by or via what mode of giving?

Taken how? Taken by or via what mode of reception?

In order for us to take something (through sensory perception or intellectual conception), it must, in the first place, in some way, be given.

Otherwise, we are oblivious, and the datum remains ungiven and is, to us — not unreal, but, rather, nothing at all. Whatever it is, however real, if we are oblivious to it, it has entirely escaped our awareness, and it is nothing to us. It remains submerged in pristine nothingness, until it itself penetrates our awareness, or someone else directs our attention to it.

A brief ecstatic interlude: At this very moment, I am directing your attention to nothingness. Nothingness, however, is only given to us by the experience of revelation ex nihilo, the radical surprise of the irruption of something from nothingness. Whatever the reality, it was there all along, but not to us, until the moment of epiphany. Sometimes such irruptions introduce a whole new mode of being, requiring everything (as we have it) to be re-understood. This is the most fascinating truth of the human condition: the omnipresent possibility of revelation ex nihilo, and the inspired reunderstanding of everything-all-at-once, which transforms the world and our place in it, on the whole and in every part, in literally inconceivable ways. Nothingness is not what it seems, and to know this exnihilates nihilism. Nothingness is eternally pregnant preexistence, the furthest possibility from dead nonexistence. Exnihilism is the best news a soul can enceive.

The mode of givenness that concerns us most is the direct, unmediated givenness known as intuition.

Intuition, as we are using it here, is the immediate awareness that something is, without reason or language recognizing what it is. Intuition apprehends being, prior to comprehension. Intuition apprehends with know-that.

Notice the “media” words: “unmediated”, “immediate”. “Medium” is another. “Media-” means middle. Something that comes between. Here the medium is reason, often, but not always, via another medium, language.

When our intellect comprehends it adds “know-what” to an apprehended “know-that”. It links this known what to a vast network of other whats and whys and hows, and makes sense of it in the context of everything else.

Etymologically, comprehension means “together-grasp”. To comprehend means, first, to grasp-together the intuited object in all its complexity as what it is — as an object of comprehension — and, second, to grasp what it is in the context of everything else, as part of a comprehensive totality we call “everything”.

But “everything” is relative, in ways unphilosophical folks seldom appreciate. When we say “everything”, we mean everything as given to us, and everything is given to each of us quite differently.

Some everythings are larger, denser and subtler than others. In order to avoid the strange pluralization of the normally singular everything, let us refer to any given everything as an enworldment.

An enworldment is everything, as given to some particular subject.

Let us understand that each enworldment appears to the enworlding, enworlded subject as the one and only everything. We naturally confuse “everything” with infinity, but infinity is infinitely more inclusive than what any of us can mean when we try to speak of infinitude. We are made in the image of the One, but we, alas, are and can only be one, unless we accept our place as organs of the infinite, what we Jews indicate when we say Adonai Echad.

When we comprehend, always with our intellect, we integrate some datum into our own given everything, which is our enworldment.

The data we are most prone to reject as unreal are given by intuition. We intuit that something is, but we do not recognize what it is. We apprehend that but cannot comprehend what. “Our reach exceeds our grasp.” We become apprehensive. In these situations we may explain our intuition away, by comprehending our apprehension as an unreasonable response to something “nonexistent”. “It was nothing real.”

Is this explaining away bad? Heavens no! We do this rejecting of misfit intuitions to preserve our enworldment. It is normal intellectual hygiene, required to maintain subjective health. Not every intuition should be admitted and integrated within our enworldment.

Which intuitions ought to be named is a matter of personal judgment, not criteria and rule.

But the judgment should revolve around matters of alienation. That is, they should consider where we are obstructed from participation in realities that matter most to our own lives together.

When the way we enworld ourselves preclude love, community, belonging, selfhood, beauty and value in general, that enworldment might need philosophical intervention.

Here is a quick litany of alienations: The positivistic limitation of real entities to objects of physics. The reduction of all meaning, including love of others, to emergent properties of purely physical processes, to evolutionary psychology. The reduction of identity to social categorization. The reduction of religion to scientistic explanation. Not to mention the reduction of science, itself — science being the disciplined systematic interaction with, observation of and understanding of matter under various conditions — to scientistic explanation! The cynical suspicion of every spontaneous conception as bias, paired with the gullible acceptance of expert claims as the remedy to bias!

Across the board, what is nearest and dearest and most concretely present in any human life is explained away as “subjective” or imaginary or distorted, in favor of far more distant, abstract and depersonalizing notions, many of which are not rooted in any possible intuitive immediacy.

These are features of an alienated and alienating enworldment shared by perhaps the majority of young members of the lower-overclass. It is responsible for a growing nihilism, manifesting in self-destructive politics and collective and individual mental illness.

If we manage to exnihilate this enworldment, we will emerge on the other side into a renaissance ex nihilo.

Mapping olamot

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

An enception is a conceptual capacity, the ability to “get” a concept. Once an enception is established (by our enworlding neshamah to our conceiving ruach), its conceptual form can be received (whether intuitively perceived or intellectually conceived) as given wherever its corresponding form occurs in reality, both by our conceiving ruach in Yetzirah, and our constructing/construing nefesh in Assiyah.

Or so I think. I’m trying to map my own experiences to the experiences of others who seem to know this strange space I navigate. Today it seems that:

Assiyah is a world of actuality, where, using given objects of perception and truth, we (as nefesh) construct systems of materials and ideas and methods, and truth is understood pshat, construed objectively in terms of their place in a constructed system, but that objectivity is determined by the conceptual repertoire given by Yetzirah. Whatever is not in that repertoire is inconceivable and is perceived as senseless chaos. Assiyah actualizes an enworldment, giving it perceptible material and symbolic form.

Yetzirah is a world of formation, where pure concepts interrelate, harmonize or clash, overlap, attract, repel, stabilize, destabilize and restabilize at various scales, forming subjective patterns of receptivity, obliviousness, attraction and revulsion in us (as ruach) which determines what is and is not given as real and true in Assiyah. Ruach is organic enceptions within enceptions, a capacitive system in everse. Yetzirah defines the limits and terms of intelligibility within an enworldment. Ruach understands in the mode of remez, that is it recognizes and relates forms, thematizing, analogizing, discovering the connectable dots and associating them, within an enworldment. Yetzirah is concerned with carrying a possibility of enworldment into its development of integrated forms and developing, integrating and strengthening it to the point where the enworldment can be actualized in Assiyah.

Beriah is a world of instauration (creation and revelation) where a new enworldment can enter Yetzirah, always ex nihilo, effecting radical expansion and reordering of subjects (ruach), how they enworld themselves (nefesh), on the whole and in part, in actual life. Amidst this change to ruach and its enworldment, a higher self maintains its continuity in Beriah as neshama. Conversion experiences are of Beriah, and they are understood in the mode of drash, homiletically, in pure and spontaneous interpretive application without objective construal, disclosing everything as belonging within an intuited, given enworldment. Beriah is where enworldments differentiate themselves within an infinite field, where difference is possible in principle.

Atzilut is the world in which all being is rooted, regardless of degree of awareness of this rootedness, in whom all neshama is of common chaya. It is from here that all value flows, and when we feel a rush of intensely inspired gratitude and joy with an epiphany from Beriah, that is the light of Atzilut, the brilliant bloodflow of the world, and it is understanding in the mode of sod. I am almost entirely sure there is much, much more to sod than this, but this is what I have had of it, if I am not mistaken.

For many years, and with increasingly intense focus, instauratio ex nihilo is crucial to me as a designer, philosopher and mystical fanatic.

My live question is cartographic. It is bound up with Beriah, but I’ve wavered on “where” it happens. I think I am moving toward (or into) an understanding that takes Beriah as a holistic world conception that perfects at Malkhut of Beriah, and bursts whole into Yetzirah as its Keter. And what it bursts through is the veil of nihilitude demarcating the worlds. On the side of Beriah, the nihilitude is part of infinitude, but on the side of Yetzirah, it is the outer limit of existence, beyond which there is nothing.

I have learned never to take that nothing on the outer limit of existence at face value. As a designer, as a philosopher and as a mystic I have pressed against the nothingness, and punctured it, and I testify: there is very real, very beautiful being on the other side of it, and if we cross over we return with transformative treasures, the best of which is exnihilist faith.

I am writing this same piece over and over again. I am circling this problem like a GPS satellite, photographing what is below, sending geolocation data down to the surface so I can figure out where I am.

A few years back, my friend Jarrett, team alchemist, gave me a framed print of a Ptolemy, as hermetic cartographer, lunar compass in one hand, solar globe in the other. This demonstrates why I have always loved working on her teams.

The one-question magic interview

Autobiography, Design, Letterpress

Years ago, when I was refocusing my career from the doing of design (and design strategy) to design research, I tried to design a protocol for interviewing my friends.

Part of my motivation was to give my friends the experience design research participant have being interviewed by researchers who are urgently interested in what they have to say. Often they don’t want it to end. They say it is better than therapy. Yet they’re just talking about mundane experiences. Being listened to closely by someone whose entire attention is focused on what you are saying is apparently rare.

So I invented what I thought was a set of fascinating questions. But it sucked. It made people more confused or anxious than inspired. I kept tweaking and tweaking. The more ordinary the questions got, the better the responses.

Eventually, after much experimenting, one question stood out. The interview never made it past this point. People would start talking, and then have an epiphany and try to answer in a new direction. They started playing and creating, and the responses were like a tour of their soul.

Some people told me that experience changed how they saw their lives and themselves.

The question is magic, and now I’m realizing I need to letterpress print it.

The interview is:

If you were writing
your autobiography,
what would be the
table of contents?

The key to the magic: the question invites a person to lay out their values architecture — to articulate the schema of what matters in their life.

Hanging with Sellars

Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Willfred Sellars said:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?’, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.

My live question: Understand how? Hang together how?

Understanding construed as hanging together as systems… constructions, theories, explanations?

Understanding conceived as hanging together wholes… gestalts, paradigms, ontologies?

Understanding comprehended as comprehensive totality within which everything hangs together… faiths, visions, wordviews?

Understanding suprehended as enworldments, each an overlapping totality of hung-together everythings, against a ground of enworldment… metaphysical epiphany?

Understanding revealed as infinite and exteriorless all-influsion of infinite One, from which the possibility of enworldment emanates… … …?

The general movement is away from objective knowing at a distance, toward deepening and expanding withinness, starting from our own withinness and continuing beyond to the withinness in whom we participate and subsist.

I know these correspond to the multiple worlds of Kabbalah and more generally of neoplatonism, and it only on this basis that I experience something that can be a basis for belief.

I am not sure precisely how the terrain I’ve walked or surveyed relates to the many maps I’ve studied, and travelogues I’ve read, but where I am is where these cartographers and adventurers have been.

Nothing could possibly be more interesting, and nothing better dispels nihilism.

This transfigured nothing is the substance of exnihilism, the ex nihilo from which all creation, revelation, instauration, configurative being and radical surprise irrupts.

Service design rhetoric (notes on a WIP)

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I think I am making progress on developing simple ways to talk about service design beyond the service system engineering most service designs do.

Before I start, though, I want to clarify something: I’m not knocking service system engineering. It is hugely important, and this is why organizations buy it. An organization with broken touchpoints and unintegrated operations is going to be so nonfunctional it will be unable to do anything else. Broken touchpoints is pretty easy to do. Integrating operations to enable them to deliver adequate, seamless service is something service design is better at doing than any other profession. Solid service system engineering is a necessary condition for both adequate service and exceptional service. But service system engineering is only a sufficient condition for adequate service. For exceptional services that inspire personal loyalty from not only those who receive it, but also those who deliver and support it, design of value exchanges is needed. And the more exceptional and the more inspiring the service aspires to be the more it needs to get serious about personal meaning and motivation.

Scrap 1: Essential services and organizational “knitbones”

This sets the stage for the rhetoric I’m developing today. It all centers on a concept: essential service. Essential service is what separates a functional socially engineered adequate service from exceptional, inspired designed services.

A person’s essential service is that thing they do for others that gives their life purpose and meaning. Perhaps we all have an essential service, if we discover what it is and find an organization that allows us to provide it. But in reality only some lucky souls find such opportunities,

Let’s call such lucky souls a “knitbone” service actor, after the knitbone plant, also known as comfrey, a plant known for its soil enrichment capabilities. A knitbone plant has a deep taproot that extends to layers of earth inaccessible to other plants and draws nourishment up to the surface. Wherever knitbone is planted, neighboring plants flourish. This is why wise gardeners plant knitbone throughout their gardens.

Service design applies the same principle to organizations. Service design tries to strategically place knitbone service actors where they can infuse meaning into their organizations. If they are on the front lines, the service they provide is felt as genuine and valuable to those who receive the service. They make strong positive brand impressions, and cultivate external brand relationships. If they support the service at or behind the front lines, they generate a culture of meaning for other employees or partners responsible for delivering or supporting services.

A knitbone service actor is inwardly motivated to perform their essential service. The value of doing this service is intrinsic to its performance. A knitbone requires little to no external motivation. There is no need for carrots nor sticks nor monitoring. They only need opportunities to perform this service, which means 1) finding other people who need and value this service, and 2) receiving whatever supporting services from other people they need to perform their own essential service effectively.

Perhaps not everyone in an organization has an essential service. Some job roles might be intrinsically motivated by anyone. I think neither of these are true, but it doesn’t matter if you disagree with me. The goal is not to achieve some perfect utopia of an entirely inspired intrinsically motivated organization. The goal is to approach it and achieve it as much as possible.

And if the vision of this kind of organization is not intrinsically compelling, and you need external motivations to care about it, consider these:

  • External motivations encourage artificial behaviors that leave neutral or negative impressions, and do not inspire loyalty. It all feels phony, empty and “corporate”.
  • External motivations are expensive. If someone wants to do something anyway, you don’t have to pay them as much as you do to get someone to do something they loathe and resent being made to do.
  • Systems designed for external motivation are expensive. The infrastructure required to monitor and enforce behavioral compliance cost a lot of money to establish, maintain and staff.
  • Externally motivated organizations will struggle to retain precisely the most valuable talent (aka its knitbone employees) who will leave the minute they have an opportunity to find a more supportive and inspiring environment.

Wow, I am starting to seriously love my magical knitbone symbol.

Scrap 2: Start with service experiences, and operationalize backwards

Another point is equally important, and complementary to essential services and knitbone service actors.

It is simple: Services should begin with service experiences and develop systematized operational capabilities to support such experiences.

Fact is, the exact opposite happens.

The way most organizations evolve is function first. The organization is organized into units that develop and perform key organizational functions. The organization needs financial accounting and other money stuff to get taken care of? Establish a finance function to cover it. Computers are important? Establish an IT function. The organization needs to get the word out and persuade customers to buy their product? Marketing. If a need arises, and none of the existing units can do it, that means it’s time to form another functional unit.

Each of these units develops its capabilities mostly in isolation from one another. And with rare exceptions, the people who will use these capabilities are barely even considered, much less involved in the development.

At the tail end of this process comes a patching-together attempt, and it is usually only patched for the customers, not the hapless souls on the front line stuck with using them to try to deliver decent services to these customers. And those who try to support the front line in various ways also struggle with the sticked together pieces-parts frankenstein monster that is their organization.

Trying to reform the organization for service is an enormous task, which involves the deepest, most complicated and difficult organizational problems involving desirability, feasibility and viability imaginable. It is at minimum three highly demanding jobs.

Postscript: More whining about the missing two-thirds of the service trio

But service design is still an immature discipline that not only lacks a service system engineering role (equivalent to the software engineer role in the classic product trio) and a service manager role (equivalent to the product manager role) — it lacks awareness that this is a problem.

And because it is way, way, way too big a job for any one person, it succumbs to the managerial/technik habit of dropping Why, and focusing solely on What and How, and in effect reduces itself to service systems engineering, enhanced with amateurish attempts at business strategy. And the profession begins to attract service system technicians who don’t even miss the desirability part of the work. And the profession as a whole devolves into a dry flavor of management consulting increasingly incapable of delivering anything inspiring or meaningful.

Distillation-in-progress

Design

To the degree a people system harnesses and serves felt and motivating value, that system will depend upon design methods for its success.

To the degree a people system is driven by coercion, that system may be socially engineered.

Most organizations are somewhere in the middle region, maybe 61.8% toward the social engineered side. These organizations use bribes, blackmail and sub-volitional manipulation (aka “behavioral economics”) to turn its unwilling gears.

A better balance would be 61.8% toward design. It would locate the inward resources of the organization — the essential services that flow meaning into the lives of those who are given the conditions to give their gift — to infuse the organization with vitality, and the charisma that naturally radiates from organizations animated by genuine desire to serve.

An example: Schools who hire motivated teachers and manage the school with the goal of supporting the teaching every born teacher naturally does will produce vital classrooms that engage and inspire students to learn and develop. This cannot happen in institutions that assume that teachers must be mechanically motivated, carrot-and-stick style. They “run the organization like a business”, setting quantifiable objectives, establishing rewards for achieving these objectives and punishments for falling short of them. This requires systems for providing visibility to the rewarding, punishing bureaucracy. Schools must “instrument” instruction so compliance to procedure may be monitored and enforced and effectiveness measured and rewarded or punished. All this diverts attention away from the teaching itself, requires hours of off-hours drudgery and causes frustration and eventual burnout. But this is not such a big problem, because the system is designed to run entirely without morale.

But this makes schools into joyless, meaningless places that all but a few students hate. So the students, also must be driven by external rewards and punishments, as opposed to an intrinsic desire to learn. This, too, is ideal for a world where businesses are “run like a business” and employees are driven to goals like stubborn mules with carrots and sticks.

Another example is healthcare. The best nurses are inwardly driven by an innate need to give care. In my own field research, I’ve been shocked at how much resistance and strain this care-drive will tolerate. But if nurses are subjected to excessive commercial, managerial and logistical duties, this depletes them of time, morale and other personal resources required to deliver the care their patients desperately need. They get stretched thin and worn down by tasks entirely unrelated to care. Healthcares facilities run this way become “clinical” — impersonal, dehumanizing, degrading and scary places.

And of course, businesses “run like businesses” are the same way. They harass, coerce, intimidate, humiliate their employees, subject them to utter chickenshit then pour bullshit onto the chickenshit, and then demand in return compelled bullshit from the employees. They must pretend to respect purposeless tedium and to feel bullshit “passion” for soulless drivel no human being could possible care about.

No organization, business or otherwise should be “run like a business”, because this is code for imposition of technik managerialism which masters What and How and the expense of authentic, felt, motivating Why, replacing it with the managerial technik counterfeit: “in-order-to”.

I just talked to Susan about what essential Why is.

Essential Why is utterly non-rational and non-technical. It has no “in-order-to” because it is itself the in-order-to for the sake of which everything else is done. It is the motivation and meaning and purpose that drives everything else.

When someone asks us “why?” of our essential Why, we have no answer. If we are in touch with our own truth, we’ll say, this is what we are about. It is the heart of the value of everything else. It is the meaning of my life. Or we just confess ignorance. “I don’t know. I just love it.”

But if we’re dominated by managerial / technik worldview, we’ll confabulate an in-order-to. We’ll pretend it has a function. “I’m visiting Rome in order to get some R&R so I can return to my work refreshed.” Whatever.

I offered her an old myth I made up. I said the Scientific Revolution made the understanding of nature much easier by focusing solely on What and How, and excluding Why from the problem.

It is a little like picking a restaurant. Two people can easily find a place. Adding a third makes it much harder.

Science has made enormous progress by excluding Why considerations from its problems. A scientist seeking a scientific account of a natural phenomenon asks What the relevant elements are and How they behave together as a system. This has worked spectacularly well. We can now force nature to do many things beyond the imagination of anyone living three centuries ago.

But success can be our worst enemy. We have over applied exclusion of Why to just about every sphere of life, even places like politics and even religion to where Why is essential. Why should never have been excluded from business.

And that is why we are suffering a nihilism pandemic.

We have excluded Why from too many places that most social systems available to us drive us like demotivated mules until we are demotivated mules.

And, despite what young managerials say, this is not “because of capitalism.” There has never been deeper, depressing, cynical nihilism anywhere on this earth than in places where Marxism was attempted.

The problem is the scientism, managerialism, technik, interminable chains of in-order-to, Whyless functionalism that is the root of scientistic, technocratic governance of every soulless organization of every scale, from global bureaucracies, to nation states, to the kinds of loveless marriage this Whylessness makes inevitable.

Jacob’s Lightning

Kabbalah, Letterpress

My next letterpress project is a Jacob’s Lightning poster, 8 x 23″.

It will be printed on Lessebo Misty Blue 111# cover.

The Jacob’s ladder (aka Jacob’s Hyperlattice) will be printed in bronze-black ink spiked with some extra metallic copper.

Jacob’s lightning will be printed in two layers, first a bright tangerine-gold spiked with extra metallic gold, and a second with pure, undiluted glow-in-the-dark, which is transparent until the lights go out.

I will not lie or even dilute the truth: this is literally magical.

Bob Dylan and I apparently disagree on the spiritual dignity of strontium aluminate:

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

Kabbalah and design

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy

People ask me how kabbalah relates to design. Here is how:

To nefesh in Assiyah, whole means comprehensive system.
To ruach in Yetzirah, whole means gestalt given.
To neshemah in Beriah, whole means enworldment.
To chayah in Atzilut, whole means atonement.

In Atzilut, only the One is whole, transcendent.
In Beriah, wholes are enworldments, given ex nihilo, revealed-created, instaurated.
In Yetzirah, wholes are given gestalts, conceived.
In Assiyah, wholes are comprehensive systems, constructed.

The Whyless philosophy

Design, Philosophy, Trefoil

It all really just keeps coming back to Liz Sanders, doesn’t it?

Our working philosophies are color-blind to meaning.

Our philosophy has What and How receptors, but lacks receptors for Why.

Through this Whyless philosophy we look at something that is useful and usable and otherwise functionally valuable, and are unable to distinguish it from something desirable. It’s the same dull blue-gray color, whether we are drawn to it for mysterious reasons or because it is more convenient, effective, efficient or reliable.

We cannot help thinking that Why is another What-How function. We ask “why?”, expecting an in-order-to. Why isn’t like that. Why doesn’t ask, because it knows. It intuits value spontaneously, directly. It is like perceiving a color.

I have actually had designers say: “If it is useful and usable, doesn’t that make it desirable?”

I think we know better. We just don’t know what to do with it.

Notice, I dont say that we are color blind to meaning, only that our philosophies are.

This means that we can intuit meaning, but when we try to talk about it, or think about it, or account for it, or justify it we find ourselves unable to do justice to our experience. And many of us are in the habit of invalidating these things we cannot talk about.

Years ago my friend Jokin told me a Basque saying “what has a name is real.” The corollary to that is “what lacks a name is unreal.” One of my job functions as a philosopher is to find concepts and language to do justice to our experiences so they can have names and the dignity of reality.

I can do this job because, for whatever reason, I refuse to deny any of my experiences reality, just because my philosophy is inadequate to it. My inclination is to take these experiences seriously and explore them to see what they’re all about. In some ways, I love philosophy because I am more independent from and less dependent on my philosophy, so I can tinker with it, without becoming too horribly schizophrenic for prolonged periods of time. Instead, I become moderately schizophrenic in short bursts, maybe most of the time.

And our meaning-blind philosophy has a way of disposing of unreal experiences. We relegate them to an unreal domain we call “subjectivity.” That is a fantastic place to put it because this same philosophy has no idea whatsoever how subjectivity works, nor how it relates to objectivity. Subjectivity is a realm of pure mistake, distortion and arbitrariness that interferes with our ability to perceive the objective world, which is more or less the exact eversion of what subjectivity is.

These strange analytical problem-solving design disciplines I keep drifting into — first UX design, then strategic design, then service design — all seem to attract practitioners with meaning-blindness. Back in the day, UX was overflowing with project managers, who saw the work as a conceptual closet organizing endeavor, and cognitive scientists, who thought the job was a matter of schema-matching between a user’s understanding and navigation structures.

It seems I’m always fighting for desirability as an irreducible element of design against people who don’t even seem aware that it is core to their job.

But I find design to be pure drudgery if desirability is not a part of it. Or, I guess I could say that only desirability makes design desirable for me.

And people wonder why our lives are so meaningless. Or they don’t wonder, but rather explain it away with one of the prefab diagnoses the Whyless philosophy provides nihilist malcontents.

When our organizations, our services, our products, our spaces are designed only for function, what do we expect to happen?

The service design industry has responded to AI disruption by zigging directly into radical Whylessness.

I am zagging.

Service system engineering

Design

If service design becomes alienated from the pluralism at the root of all design praxis, it devolves into social engineering — the construction of systems assembled from nonhuman and dehumanized, choiceless human components.

Service design is only design to the degree that it maintains awareness of the humanity and freedom of the service actors who participate in the social systems we develop, and serves precisely this humanity, this freedom in participation.

Designers are designers only when they are tacking between multiple first-person perspectives:

  • Their own first-person design perspective which combines pluralism and craft
  • The perspectives of their clients and stakeholders
  • The perspectives of the service actors who will eventually participate in the service system they are designing

The tricky part of this is that client and stakeholder perspectives are rarely pluralistic, and these are the people with whom service designers collaborate. Paradoxically, if designers empathize too strongly and for too long with their client collaborators, and become too fluent in their language and too reliant on their key concepts, they can lose touch with their design perspective.

They can “go native” in the corporate world, and adopt as their own primary perspective that of management, technology and technocrats. And from that perspective, the perspectives and experiences of service actors will lose importance, and become secondary to behaviors.

This is the first factor in service design’s collective alienation from design.

A second factor compounds the first: where services are seriously broken at a fundamental, functional level, functional fixes are sufficient. A service designer can employ the engineering aspects of our discipline and dispense with the design part, and just by fixing the most egregious malfunction, still provide enormous value.

Service design is one of the few fields that approach organizational operations comprehensively and systematically. We have methods in our toolbox that can effectively fix this kind of breakdown. Service designers are a pretty good fit for solving operation systems problems.

But a more mature service systems field would, like every other mature design discipline, provide designers with an engineering counterpart. This kind of system repair work would be done by a “service systems engineer”.

It is only because this role does not yet exist that service designers do it. But this work can be done perfectly well by non-designers with sufficient training. Identifying operational malfunctions (“pain points”), assessing the behavioral responses to the pain, estimating the business impact of these behaviors, helping organizations prioritize and sequence a repair backlog, and establishing long-term detection-and-repair practices — these are all management and/or system engineering functions. They are colossally important. But they are not design. Calling them “design” just because designers are currently doing it suggests someone might have already fully lost touch with what design essentially is and does.

But there is a third factor, that compounds the already-compounded problem.

Most of the demand for “service design” right now is precisely service systems engineering work.

Service design is still relatively new, and has not yet had time to impact the general quality level of services, like, for instance UX has. Atrocious services are still pretty common, and in some fields where service matters most — healthcare, insurance, telecoms all come to mind — atrocious service is the norm.

It is precisely these fields which hire service designers. They’re all in various stages of emergency. Their roofs are caving in and their toilets are geysering. They’re the ones who call service designers, because they’re the ones with the tools needed to repair these problems.

In deeply broken industries, the advantage goes to the least broken organization. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Competition is relative function versus malfunction.

It is comparable in some ways to the early days of computers, when people got the best functioning one, or the cheapest one, and had no expectations that a computer might be delightful to use, reflect their sensibilities, become something a normal (non-engineer) person could become attached to. At that point in the evolution of the computer industry design was secondary, especially the design of what was on the computer screens.

It is only when functionality becomes table stakes that design comes into its own as design. Everything can be assumed to work, so which option resonates with me as a person. What strikes me as compelling, meaningful and represents or expresses in some unsayable way, who I am and what I care about?

It’s sort of a Maslow’s hierarchy sort of thing:

  1. Does anyone have a use for it?
  2. Does it work at all?
  3. Does it work well? Is it reliable and efficient?
  4. Can people figure out how to use it?
  5. Can people use it easily?
  6. Do people who need it, like it enough to choose it over alternatives?
  7. Do people feel emotionally compelled by it?
  8. Do people value it and want it to be a part of their life?

Design only becomes important somewhere between 4 and 5, and grows more and more indispensable from there.

But service design still operates mainly in the 1-4 range.

Meanwhile, the service designers who excel in the engineering aspects of the discipline are dominating the field and gradually turning it into an engineering consulting profession.

Designers who care about human perspectives, experiences, motivations — what makes people care about things and connect with them — are far less valuable, and will remain so until the field grows up more and the field of competition advances beyond “are we pissing people off?”

But (at least from where I’m standing) the field of service design appears to be optimizing for its engineering and management functions and allowing design to atrophy. The field might even be selecting for non-designers. Indeed, I see vanishingly few virtues of design in the work done by service designers. Outputs are extraordinarily complex and lack all simple, let alone meaningful or inspiring gestalt. They are oriented far more around elimination of flaws and gaps than the presence of positive connection. The whole discipline is dry and technical. The only remaining trace of design left in any of it is better visual production and decoration of deliverables.